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Monday, February 22, 2016

Gertrude Bulmer Bishop (Elizabeth Bishop's mother) witnessed the Halifax Explosion on 9
December 1917. She was a patient at the Nova Scotia
Hospital (Mount
Hope) on the Dartmouth
side of Halifax Harbour,
when just after 9:00 a.m. that morning the munitions ship Mont Blanc and the Belgian relief ship Imo collided, causing the Mont Blanc to explode. Much as been written about the
explosion, the damage and the aftermath. Elizabeth Bishop herself was in Worcester, MA, at that
time; but Massachusetts
(part of the “Boston States”) mounted an immediate relief effort – perhaps
Bishop’s paternal grandparents contributed to it, they would certainly have
known about it and the explosion.

Anything connected to the explosion has always been of great
interest to me. With the centenary of the catastrophe less than two years away,
there will be more writing about this event. This past fall, scholar and author
Janet Maybee published Aftershock: The
Halifax Explosion and the Persecution of Pilot Francis Mackey, which offers
fascinating insights into the aftermath of the explosion.

Janet presented “An Afternoon with…” at the Elizabeth Bishop
House in April 2013 — where she discussed her work on this book with a rapt
audience. Janet is a great supporter of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia, having
helped out with festivals, events and projects. So it is a great pleasure to
help promote this book and a superb website she has created. Check it out at: http://www.pilotmackey.ca/This website contains a fascinating series of
maps that tell the story of the explosion. And you can listen to a wonderful
interview Janet did for CBC Radio’s Atlantic Voice.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

In her memoir “The Country Mouse,” which is about her time
in Worcester
with her paternal grandparents from October 1917 to May 1918, Elizabeth Bishop
wrote:

"I did stay on at school through Thanksgiving, I suppose,
because there was the business about the Pilgrim Fathers. Miss Woodhead made a
model of “The Landing of the Pilgrims” on a large tabletop. The Rock was the
only real thing. Miss Woodhead made the ocean in a spectacular way: she took
large sheets of bright blue paper, crumpled them up, and stretched them out
over the table. Then, with the blackboard chalk, she made glaring whitecaps of
all the points: an ocean grew right before our eyes. There were some little
ships, some doll people, and we also helped make log cabins. (Twenty years
later I learned the Pilgrim Fathers had no log cabins when they landed.) But I
felt closely related to them all: “Land
where my father died / Land of the pilgrims’ pride” — for a long time I
took the first line personally. Miss Woodhead asked us to bring anything we had
at home to contribute to Plymouth and Thanksgiving, and in my conceit I said
(to the wonder and admiration of the class, I hoped) that we had some real
little trees, just the right size with snow on them. So I contributed four trees
from the toy village my grandparents let me play with, and from then on the
village was half deforested when set up at home." (The Collected Prose, 24)

This passage came immediately to mind when a friend sent me
a link to a story about a recent and amazing discovery at the Emerson High School in
Oklahoma City of nearly 100-year-old chalk boards covered
with lessons, some of which were about the Pilgrims.

Clearly, in 1917, curriculum across the US included a history lesson about the arrival
of these Europeans on the shores of the New World.
Each teacher had his or her own take on how to teach this lesson. Even Bishop got some of that lesson (including the use of chalk!) before
illness took her out of school at the end of 1917. Astonishing that this chalk survived so vividly for a century.

Monday, February 8, 2016

5 September 2017: Nulla dies sine linea

[Today, near the beginning of a new month traditionally associated with the first day of school we begin a new feature to replace the long-running "Today in Bishop." Each day we hope to post a brief reflection on a line from Bishop's poetry, beginning with the title of the first poem in her first book, North & South. We would be happy to have contributions from the Patronage-at-Large, should anyone be so inclined.]

"The Map"

Not simply "Map": abstract, generalized, a concept more than an object, perhaps not even a noun at all, but an imperative, an imperious directive; nor yet "A Map": token of a type, a random example run across by chance, perhaps, on the dusty dark-fumed oak table in the centre of Marks & Co. once-upon-a-time during a long-anticipated visit to 84, Charing Cross Road just prior to its burial beneath a modernist glass tower, where its once-upon-a-place is now marked by a memorial plaque; no, no, no — "The Map" — unique, archetypal, redolent of all that makes it one-and-only, but also a congeries of interwoven metonymies as patterned and abundant as the sixth of the "La Dame à la licorne" Flemish tapestries ("À mon seul désir") or as Vermeer's "De Soldaat en het Lachende Meisje"— or, yet again, as the map in EB's "Primer Class."

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John Barnstead

I retired in 2014 after forty years of teaching Russian language and literature. I'm a past president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Sandra Barry

I am a poet, independent scholar, freelance editor, and secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Suzie LeBlanc

I am a professional singer who recently became a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop's writing. I am also fond of walking and nature and I became involved with the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary because I wanted to have her poems set to music so that I could sing them.